Wikipedia articles of interest

“The Victorian era of British history was the period of Queen Victoria‘s reign from 20 June 1837 until her death on 22 January 1901. It was a long period of peace, prosperity, refined sensibilities and national self-confidence for Britain.[citation needed] Some scholars date the beginning of the period in terms of sensibilities and political concerns to the passage of the Reform Act 1832.

Culturally there was a transition away from the rationalism of the Georgian period and toward romanticism and mysticism with regard to religion, social values, and the arts.[1] In international relations the era was a long period of peace, known as the Pax Britannica, and economic, colonial, and industrial consolidation, temporarily disrupted by the Crimean War in 1854. The end of the period saw the Boer War. Domestically, the agenda was increasingly liberal with a number of shifts in the direction of gradual political reform, industrial reform and the widening of the voting franchise. […]

The population of England almost doubled from 16.8 million in 1851 to 30.5 million in 1901.[2] Scotland’s population also rose rapidly, from 2.8 million in 1851 to 4.4 million in 1901. Ireland’s population decreased rapidly, from 8.2 million in 1841 to less than 4.5 million in 1901, mostly due to the Great Famine.[3] At the same time, around 15 million emigrants left the United Kingdom in the Victorian era and settled mostly in the United States, Canada, and Australia.[4] […]

The mortality rates in England changed greatly through the 19th century. There was no catastrophic epidemic or famine in England or Scotland in the 19th century – it was the first century in which a major epidemic did not occur throughout the whole country, with deaths per 1000 of population per year in England and Wales dropping from 21.9 from 1848–54 to 17 in 1901 (contrasting with, for instance, 5.4 in 1971).[5] […]

The Victorian era became notorious for the employment of young children in factories and mines and as chimney sweeps.[27] Child labour, often brought about by economic hardship, played an important role in the Industrial Revolution from its outset: Charles Dickens, for example, worked at the age of 12 in a blacking factory, with his family in a debtors’ prison. In 1840 only about 20 percent of the children in London had any schooling. By 1860 about half of the children between 5 and 15 were in school (including Sunday school).[28]

The children of the poor were expected to help towards the family budget, often working long hours in dangerous jobs for low wages.[25] Agile boys were employed by the chimney sweeps; small children were employed to scramble under machinery to retrieve cotton bobbins; and children were also employed to work in coal mines, crawling through tunnels too narrow and low for adults. Children also worked as errand boys, crossing sweepers, shoe blacks, or sold matches, flowers, and other cheap goods.[25] Some children undertook work as apprentices to respectable trades, such as building, or as domestic servants (there were over 120,000 domestic servants in London in the mid 18th century). Working hours were long: builders might work 64 hours a week in summer and 52 in winter, while domestic servants worked 80 hour weeks. Many young people worked as prostitutes (the majority of prostitutes in London were between 15 and 22 years of age).[28] […]

Children as young as four were put to work. In coal mines children began work at the age of 5 and generally died before the age of 25. Many children (and adults) worked 16 hour days. As early as 1802 and 1819, Factory Acts were passed to limit the working hours of workhouse children in factories and cotton mills to 12 hours per day. These acts were largely ineffective […]

Beginning in the late 1840s, major news organisations, clergymen, and single women became increasingly concerned about prostitution, which came to be known as “The Great Social Evil”. Estimates of the number of prostitutes in London in the 1850s vary widely (in his landmark study, Prostitution, William Acton reported that the police estimated there were 8,600 in London alone in 1857). When the United Kingdom Census 1851 publicly revealed a 4% demographic imbalance in favour of women (i.e., 4% more women than men), the problem of prostitution began to shift from a moral/religious cause to a socio-economic one. The 1851 census showed that the population of Great Britain was roughly 18 million; this meant that roughly 750,000 women would remain unmarried simply because there were not enough men. These women came to be referred to as “superfluous women” or “redundant women”, and many essays were published discussing what, precisely, ought to be done with them.[29] […] Divorce legislation introduced in 1857 allowed for a man to divorce his wife for adultery, but a woman could only divorce if adultery were accompanied by cruelty. The anonymity of the city led to a large increase in prostitution and unsanctioned sexual relationships.”

An image from the article, displaying “working class life in Victorian Wetherby, West Yorkshire”:

“A landlocked country is a country entirely enclosed by land, or whose only coastlines lie on closed seas.[1][2][3][4] There are 48 landlocked countries in the world, including partially recognized states. No landlocked countries are found on North American, Australian, and inhospitable Antarctic continents. The general economic and other disadvantages experienced by landlocked countries makes the majority of these countries Landlocked Developing Countries (LLDCs).[5] Nine of the twelve countries with the lowest HDI scores are landlocked.[6] […] Historically, being landlocked was regarded as a disadvantageous position. It cuts the country off from sea resources such as fishing, but more importantly cuts off direct access to seaborne trade which makes up a large percentage of international trade. Coastal regions tended to be wealthier and more heavily populated than inland ones. […] Landlocked developing countries have significantly higher costs of international cargo transportation compared to coastal developing countries (in Asia the ratio is 3:1).[10]”

Landlocked countries make out 11,4% of the total land area of Earth, and the countries make out an estimated 6,9% of the world population.

“A landlocked country surrounded only by other landlocked countries may be called a “doubly landlocked” country. A person in such a country has to cross at least two borders to reach a coastline.

Afghan tribes launched numerous attacks against the column as it made slow progress through the winter snows of the Hindu Kush. In total the India Company army lost 4,500 troops, along with 12,000 civilian workers, family members and other camp-followers. The final stand was made just outside a village called Gandamak on 13 January.[2]

Out of more than 16,000 people from the column commanded by Elphinstone, only one European, an Assistant Surgeon named William Brydon, and a few sepoys would eventually reach Jalalabad. The Afghanis subsequently released a number of British prisoners and civilian hostages. However many Indians were not handed back and were instead sold into slavery or killed.

The retreat has been described as “the worst British military disaster until the fall of Singapore exactly a century later.[3] […]

Sir Willoughby Cotton was replaced as commander of the remaining British troops by the ageing and infirm Sir William Elphinstone. The 59-year-old Major General, who was initially unwilling to accept the appointment, had entered the British army in 1804. He was made a Companion of the Bath for leading the 33rd Regiment of Foot at the Battle of Waterloo. By 1825 he had been promoted to colonel and made a major-general in 1837. Although Elphinstone was a man of high birth and perfect manners, his colleague and contemporary General William Nott regarded him as “the most incompetent soldier who ever became general”. […]

Throughout the third day, the column laboured through the pass. Once the main body had moved through, the Afghans left their positions to massacre the stragglers and the wounded. By the evening of 9 January, the column had only moved 25 miles (40 km) but already 3,000 people had died. Most had been killed in the fighting, but some had frozen to death or even taken their own lives.

By the fourth day, a few hundred soldiers deserted and tried to return to Kabul but they were all killed. By now Elphinstone, who had ceased giving orders, sat silently on his horse. On the evening of 11 January, Lady Sale, along with the wives and children of both British and Indian officers, and their retinues, accepted Akbar Khan’s assurances of protection. Despite deep mistrust, the group was taken into the custody of Akbar’s men. However once they were hostages, all the Indian servants and sepoy wives were murdered. Akbar Khan’s envoys then returned and persuaded Elphinstone and his second in command, Brigadier Shelton, to become hostages, too. Both senior officers agreed to surrender, abandoning their men to their fate. Elphinstone died on 23 April as a captive. […] On 13 January, a British officer from the 16,000 strong column rode into Jalalabad on a wounded horse (a few sepoys, who had hidden in the mountains, followed in the coming weeks). The sole survivor of the 12-man cavalry group, assistant Surgeon William Brydon, was asked upon arrival what happened to the army, to which he answered “I am the army”. Although part of his skull had been sheared off by a sword, he ultimately survived because he had insulated his hat with a magazine which deflected the blow. […]

The annihilation of about 16,500 people left Britain and India in shock and the Governor General, Lord Auckland, suffered a stroke upon hearing the news. In the Autumn of 1842 an “Army of Retribution” led by Sir George Pollock, with William Nott and Robert Sale commanding divisions, levelled Kabul. Sale personally rescued his wife Lady Sale and some other hostages from the hands of Akbar Khan. However, the slaughter of an army by Afghan tribesmen was humiliating for the British authorities in India.

Of the British prisoners, 32 officers, over 50 soldiers, 21 children and 12 women survived to be released in September 1842. An unknown number of sepoys and other Indian prisoners were sold into slavery in Kabul or kept as captives in mountain villages.[9] […]

The leadership of Elphinstone is seen as a notorious example of how the ineptitude and indecisiveness of a senior officer could compromise the morale and effectiveness of a whole army (though already much depleted). Elphinstone completely failed to lead his soldiers, but fatally exerted enough authority to prevent any of his officers from exercising proper command in his place.”

“The Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary or United States Penitentiary, Alcatraz Island (often just referred to as Alcatraz) was a maximum high-security Federal prison on Alcatraz Island, 1.25 miles (2.01 km) off the coast of San Francisco, California, USA, which operated from 1934 to 1963. […]

Alcatraz was designed to hold prisoners who continuously caused trouble at other federal prisons. One of the world’s most notorious, and best known prisons over the years, Alcatraz housed some 1576 of America’s most ruthless criminals […] Faced with high running maintenance costs and a poor reputation, Alcatraz closed on March 21, 1963. […]

The prison cells typically measured 9 feet (2.7 m) by 5 feet (1.5 m) and 7 feet (2.1 m) high. The cells were primitive and lacked privacy, with a bed, a desk and a washbasin and toilet on the back wall and few furnishings except a blanket. Black people were segregated from the rest in cell designation due to racial abuse being prevalent. […]

By the 1950s, the prison conditions had improved and prisoners were gradually permitted more privileges such as the playing of musical instruments, watching movies at weekends, painting, and radio use; the strict code of silence became more relaxed and prisoners were permitted to talk quietly.[17] However, the prison continued to be unpopular on the mainland into the 1950s; it was by far the most expensive prison institution in the United States and continued to be perceived by many as America’s most extreme jail.[19][10] […] A 1959 report indicated that Alcatraz was more than three times more expensive to run than the average US prison; $10 per prisoner per day compared to $3 in most others prisons.[20] The problem of Alcatraz was exacerbated by the fact that the prison had seriously deteriorated structurally in exposure to the salt air and wind and would need $5 million to deal with it. Major repairs began in 1958 but by 1961 the prison was evaluated by engineers to be a lost cause and Robert F. Kennedy submitted plans for a new maximum-security institution at Marion, Illinois.[10] After the escape from Alcatraz in June 1962, the prison was the subject of heated investigations, and with the major structural problems and ongoing expense, the prison finally closed on 21 March 1963.[20] […] Today the penitentiary is a museum and one of San Francisco’s major tourist attractions, attracting some 1.5 million visitors annually.[21][22] […]

Security in the prison was very tight, with the constant checking of bars, doors, locks, electrical fixtures etc., to ensure that security hadn’t been broken.[40] During a standard day the prisoners would be counted 13 times, and the ratio of prisoners to guards was the lowest of any American prison of the time.[41][42] […]

The library, which utilized a closed-stack paging system, had a collection of 10,000 to 15,000 books […] The average prisoner read 75 to 100 books a year.[66]”

Pathological science is the process by which “people are tricked into false results … by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions”.[1][2] The term was first used by Irving Langmuir, Nobel Prize-winning chemist, during a 1953 colloquium at the Knolls Research Laboratory. Langmuir said a pathological science is an area of research that simply will not “go away”—long after it was given up on as ‘false’ by the majority of scientists in the field. He called pathological science “the science of things that aren’t so”.[3]

Pathological science, as defined by Langmuir, is a psychological process in which a scientist, originally conforming to the scientific method, unconsciously veers from that method, and begins a pathological process of wishful data interpretation (see the Observer-expectancy effect, and cognitive bias). Some characteristics of pathological science are:

The maximum effect that is observed is produced by a causative agent of barely detectable intensity, and the magnitude of the effect is substantially independent of the intensity of the cause.

The effect is of a magnitude that remains close to the limit of detectability, or many measurements are necessary because of the very low statistical significance of the results.

The increased availability in upwelling regions results in high levels of primary productivity and thus fishery production. Approximately 25% of the total global marine fish catches come from five upwellings that occupy only 5% of the total ocean area.[3]”

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"Happiness and its anticipation are […] proximate mechanisms that lead us to perform and repeat acts that in the environments of history, at least, would have led to greater reproductive success." (Richard D. Alexander)